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Why I'm turning my son into a cyborg (archive) (alt)
Imagine if everyone spoke a language you don't understand. People have been speaking it around you since the day you were born, but while everyone else picks it up immediately, for you it means nothing. Others become frustrated with you. Friendships and jobs are difficult. Just being "normal" becomes a battle.
For many with autism, this is the language of emotion. For those on the spectrum, fluency in facial expressions doesn't come for free as it does for "neurotypicals." To them, reading facial expressions seems like a superpower.
So when my son was diagnosed, I reacted not just as a mom. I reacted as a mad scientist and built him a superpower.
This isn't the first time I've played mad scientist with my son's biology. When he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I hacked his insulin pump and built an AI that learned to match his insulin to his emotions and activities. I've also explored neurotechnologies to augment human sight, hearing, memory, creativity, and emotions. Tiger moms might obsess over the "right" prep schools and extracurriculars for their child, but I say why leave their intellect up to chance?
I've chosen to turn my son into a cyborg and change the definition of what it means to be human. But do my son's engineered superpowers make him more human, or less?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday July 19 2019, @03:14PM
I read a web comic called Last Resort and one of the characters in it wears an "autie lens". It's the same idea of an emotion reading ai that then signals the user what emotions are being presented and suggests possible responses to the wearer.
This is interesting to me, as when I was a young kid I could have been diagnosed as ASD under current guidelines. I was one of the lucky percentage (15% or so) that the neural development happens, just at a later time, so I became much less so as I grew up. I can well remember how people's emotions and behavior were a mystery to me. Over time, I learned how to tell what they were feeling and how to respond. How much of that was just learning, and how much it was that as I grew up, I was pruning/making neural connections in a more normal manner I don't know.
I often daydreamed/fantasized as a kid that I was an alien probe sent to figure out and mimic human emotions.
My only concern is that this could act as a crutch that in some cases could hold back actual learning of emotional cues in the borderline cases. If you just depend on the machine telling you what people's expressions mean, you may not learn to do it yourself.
In a similar thing, I never memorized the multiplication tables until 5th grade. I just carried a table on an index card in my back pocket. I became so dependent on it and resistant to actually learning them that my dad (a high school teacher) resorted to flash cards with an immediate reward for right answers and (very mild) punishment for wrong ones (hilarity ensued when I answered, got my hand slapped and both me and my older brother who was listening in spoke up that I had given the right answer. :) ). The actual point is that in some ASD kids, the addiction to a coping mechanism can be extremely strong and hard to change.
In the case of someone who is more severely impacted, that wouldn't apply, and just like someone missing a leg, a crutch would be quite appropriate.